Lurianic Kabbala

major reference

After the establishment of the Zoharic corpus, no major changes took place in Jewish esoterism until the middle of the 16th century, when a religious centre of extreme importance for Judaism, mainly inspired by teachers coming from families expelled from Spain, was established in Safed (in Upper Galilee, Palestine; present-day Ẕefat, Israel). Kabbalistic literary output had been...

Kabbala

By the mid-16th century the unchallenged centre of Kabbala was Safed, Galilee, where one of the greatest of all Kabbalists, Isaac ben Solomon Luria, spent the last years of his life. According to Gershom Gerhard Scholem, a modern Jewish scholar of Kabbala, Luria’s influence was surpassed only by that of the Sefer ha-zohar. Lurianic Kabbala developed several basic doctrines: the...

work of Luria

What is called Lurianic Kabbala is a voluminous collection of Luria’s Kabbalistic doctrines, recorded after his death by Ḥayyim Vital and appearing in two versions under different editorship. Because of this work, Lurianic Kabbala became the new thought that influenced all Jewish mysticism after Luria, competing with the Kabbala of Cordovero. Vital laboured much to give Lurianic Kabbala...